hackthis_archive | Dom’s mind is nothing like reality.

The World According to Taxi Drivers
LOTRips -- DM/BB & DM/EW, et. al.

i. Love is like a weight on a scale. One person or the other bears its burden.

Billy always makes the first move.

Whether it’s in the van or on the plane or after staggering home drunkenly after a night down at the pub -- Billy always touches Dom first.

Sometimes it’s after years of keeping secrets or months of longing glances. They’re like a Shakespearean comedy stumbling over each other until the truth is revealed. Sometimes Billy makes his move mere hours after the first time they met.

In Dom’s mind, Billy always makes the first move.

His kisses are soft and slow or hard and fast. Demanding, requesting, enticing, always knowing what Dom wants without Dom needing to ask for it. Billy’s fingers are a thousand places at one time: pushing up Dom’s shirt, pinching his nipples and stroking the inside of Dom’s wrist.

Billy’s fingers are sure and warm; they’re never cold or fumbling. He deftly unzips Dom’s trousers and slips his hand under the waistband or through the opening of his boxers. Billy’s thumb rubs over the head of Dom’s cock and he knows exactly the right place to make Dom whimper and moan. He presses a little too hard against the sensitive spot on the underside of Dom’s dick, and Dom can’t help himself. He’s wanton and open. He’s willing to beg. He just wants. He wants Billy so much, and Billy’s eyes go dark every time Dom says so.

Every time Dom confesses how long he’s been waiting, how keen he is, how much he’s put himself through while waiting for Billy, Billy just smiles.

Billy’s always smiling.

He’s always understanding and willing; he’s always available. He always feels exactly the same way Dom does, except --

Except that this is not real life; this is only in Dom’s mind.

In Dom’s mind, he’s together with Billy and they’re happy, but Dom’s mind is nothing like reality.

In real life, Dom’s in Los Angeles and Billy’s in Scotland, and nothing has ever happened. In real life, Dom is all talk and no action, and Billy has no idea how Dom feels.

Dom’s reality is the back of a black cab on his way to Billy’s from Glasgow International, because Billy wants Dom to meet his girlfriend.

Billy says he’s in love –-

Dom knows he’s in hell. And he doesn’t want to like her, except he does.

She makes Billy laugh almost as much as Dom does, and when Billy touches her, she responds. This girl, this woman, curls around Billy like his body belongs to her, and it makes Dom’s eye twitch and his palms sweat.

Billy shouldn’t have that sort of chemistry with anyone but him, and no one should have that much access to Billy except Dom. Dom wants it all to stop. He wants her gone. Dom wants to push stop on the video or flip back to the middle of the book so he can choose another ending, like those books he read to practise his English after his family moved from Germany.

ii. Don’t worry if one person is not showing you the same love that someone else has shown you. No two loves are the same.

Elijah is not Billy.

He doesn’t sound the same or dress the same or smell the same. He pushes his toothpaste from the middle of the tube instead of the bottom. He prefers coffee to tea. He sleeps on the left side of the bed instead of the right. His eyes are the wrong color, and when he sings in the shower, his voice isn’t this amazing thing that Dom wants to record. But. Elijah is young and energetic and enthusiastic about everything, and he’s tolerant. He’s more willing to humour Dom when he’s being a feckless git, and while this is not necessarily a bad thing, it’s not necessarily a good thing either.

Elijah doesn’t have the same sense of humour that Dom shares with Billy. They find the same things amusing, but not for the same reasons, and sometimes, when they’re together, Dom will look away, and when he looks back he’s confused to see Lij and not Billy.

It’s not that Dom doesn’t care for Elijah, because he does. Dom cares when Elijah goes off to Seattle and mucks about with Franka, and he cares when the press refuse to stop hounding them everywhere they go. He worries when Elijah smokes too much and eats too little, because he wants him to be safe and happy, and sometimes he can’t help but nag. Sometimes Dom can’t help but emulate, either. His mum’ll knock him sideways when she finds out he’s taken up smoking now. And the thing about it is that Elijah knows Dom as well as anyone and perhaps better than most, with the exception of his mum -- and Billy. And Dom loves him for this.

Dom loves Elijah for letting him lay about his house playing video games and not whinging about his staying out too late. He loves Elijah for the way he moans underneath him in the wee hours of the morning and the way he pants in Dom’s ear when Dom’s shagging him on the kitchen floor. Elijah’s eyes go dark when Dom touches him, whether it’s soft or hard or patient or harsh. Elijah can be perfectly submissive or extremely dominant.

He’s everything that Dominic should want.

There’s no reason for Dom to be unhappy.

But he is.

What he has is never what he wants.

iii. You can’t go with the person who loves you. That means nothing. You have to be with the person you love.

Dom thinks the noise is never going to stop no matter how long he runs.

The voices follow him everywhere: London, New York, Manchester, Paris, Spain, Silverlake, the Hollywood hills, Santa Monica, Venice, fucking radio stations, and television studios as well. He’s never far away enough from the press and the papers and the internet and people bloody haranguing him about the choices he’s made and the things he might or might not have done.

Even when he’s asleep his ears are still full of Elijah’s curses before he left for New York and Orlando’s callous ribbing about the dodgy state of Dom’s social life. Viggo’s sage advice and Sir Ian’s knowing silences pervade every hour of Dom’s day. The voices in his head are angry and disappointed, and they won’t leave him alone because he’s being a bloody-minded idiot. In Dom’s dreams the phone rings, and his agent is on the other end telling him that he’s being dropped because he can’t act like he’s got any sense let alone conduct a relationship the proper way. And then there’s Billy and his girl.

Her voice is always in the periphery of everything Dom thinks because her voice is on Billy’s answerphone, and Dom knows it should be his voice instead.

It could all have been so simple, but now it’s not, and Dom wishes he’d said something when he had the chance. He knows it’s very close to being too late. He reckons that any day now there’s going to be a phone call about an engagement, and if he doesn’t open his mouth he will have to keep his peace forever.

So, five years, two months, three days and six hours after the first time Dominic met Billy, and four years, six months and a day after Dominic realised he was in love, he finds himself on his way to a modest two-up and two-down in the heart of Glasgow to say something he should have said a long time ago.

The route is the same, but the destination is different.

Dom hasn’t bothered to tell Billy he’s coming, and he hasn’t a fucking clue what he’s going to say when he arrives, but that’s not really important anymore.

What’s important is that Dom stop living in his head. He has to stop substituting what he wants for what he has, and no matter what else happens, Dom has to stop listening to other people and start living his life.

-end-

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